The evening was very well attended and it was especially nice to see so many of our new members. Ruth talked to us about her love of making from a young age and about her attitude towards her work, seeing everything as potentially a work in progress. She recognized the helpfulness for her of having a good grounding in basic skills and then being able to bend the rules. She began her skill development in printing weaving and dyeing through education and then learnt independently free machine embroidery.
Ruth works on undyed, unprinted fabric and recommended Empress Mills Egyptian cotton bundles, although she noted that it is less well suited to hand stitching. She also likes to use vintage fabrics that have already had a life and (a more left field) suggestion, Boots absorbent sterile dressing rolls. Ruth builds and layers surfaces using hand dyed fabric and thread and fabric paints to paint backgrounds. In the talk she recognized that we don’t all want to hand dye, she also recommended variegated thread and suggested that they can be separated into strands and recombined so that the colours are more subtle and broken up. She uses machine and hand stitching and mentioned her love of colonial knots.
Ruth takes inspiration from the world around her and shared beautiful pieces, including pieces based on her beach-combing , one of which is pictured below.
Ruth is leading a workshop for the branch in November and we will be making botanical lanterns like these lovely examples pictured below. Given the success of our talk we can be confident of a good day.
We also held our usual raffle, with bags from Meriel and Brenda, shown below. Our next meeting on 13th November features Clair Cooper Walsh talking about mixed media textiles. The raffle bag colour is silver. We were reminded that the Christmas competition is ‘Frost’. Please enter if you can it is a chance to share our work and is celebratory rather than competitive.
Birmingham Embroidery and Textile Art 